Lab notes
Working notes
from inside the lab.
Notes on what we are doing, what we tried, and what we learned. Informal, technical, sometimes wrong in hindsight. When a note matures into a paper, we publish the paper to the preprint server and link back here.
- 10 February 2026Propulsion
Optimising Mach-effect thrusters: a computational approach
How we used finite-element analysis to achieve a 340% improvement in force-to-power ratio on our latest Mach-effect thruster design — and the three hardware assumptions that have to hold for the gain to be real.
Elena Voss · 12 min
- 28 January 2026Mathematics
GPU-accelerated numerical relativity: lessons from our cluster
We migrated our numerical-relativity pipeline to GPU compute. Here's what we learned about performance, precision, and the tradeoffs between them — including the failure mode that cost us two weeks.
Sarah Okonkwo · 9 min
- 15 January 2026Materials
Metamaterial shielding v2: from simulation to prototype
Our simulated designs worked. Fabrication taught us what the simulation hadn't. A short note on the assumptions that survived and the ones that didn't.
James Park · 7 min
- 18 December 2025Mathematics
What it actually takes to hold an Alcubierre bubble still
We integrated a family of Alcubierre metrics under weakened energy conditions. The integrated stress-energy requirement scales as R²/σ; below a certain threshold the bubble collapses within one light-crossing time.
Sarah Okonkwo · 14 min
- 3 November 2025Propulsion
Open protocol for sub-μN thrust metrology
Everything we wish someone had written before we started: apparatus, calibration, error budget, and an analysis pipeline you can copy. Released under CC-BY-4.0 so other groups can reproduce (and push back on) our results.
Ana Petrova · 16 min
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